We all receive messages growing up. We are told what success, power, and leadership look like. For all women, and especially Women of Color, we get messages that power and wisdom resides outside of us. But, we don’t find true power in some north star outside us. We need to shed what does not serve us and bring in messages that do. That is how we step into this moment of leadership. Deepa Purushothaman is a cofounder of nFormation which provides brave, safe, new space for professional Women of Color. She is also the author of The First, The Few, The Only: How Women of Color Redefine Power in Corporate America which will be published by HarperCollins in March 2022 and she is a Women and Public Policy Program Leader in Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to this, Deepa spent more than twenty years at Deloitte and was “a first” Indian American woman to make partner. She served as a National Managing Partner of Inclusion and was also the US Managing Partner of WIN (Women’s Initiative), Deloitte’s renowned program to recruit, retain, and advance women. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx